This comes on top of LG's usual XD Engine processing system, with its focus on improving colours, black levels, sharpness and so on. Plus, you get so many other picture adjustments – including a colour management system – that you can have the TV professionally calibrated by an Imaging Science Foundation (ISF) engineer. Very unusual for such an affordable TV.

Intense colours

After a few minutes spent tinkering with the 42LG6100's options, we wound up with a picture that really explodes off the screen, thanks to a combination of exceptionally bright, pure peak whites, some decently deep black levels, and colours that look unusually intense and bright, even by LCD standards.

Crucially, though, unlike LG TVs of old, this extreme colour vibrancy doesn't come at the expense of very natural tones, especially – but not exclusively – when watching high-definition sources.

The 42LG6100's SD efforts are in most ways much improved over previous LG sets, too, looking much less noisy and quite a bit sharper.

Motion problems

When it comes to the thorny issue of motion, meanwhile, the 42LG6100 does okay, with a couple of caveats. The first of these concerns the TruMotion 100Hz engine which, while making motion more fluid, also introduces distracting twitches, glitches and even 'jump cuts'. We generally left it off, although this means images suffer with judder from time to time.

Other more minor 42LG6100 issues include less sharpness to HD playback than we'd ideally like, an occasional lack of shadow detail in dark picture areas, and an uninspiring audio performance, tainted by slightly harsh trebles and a tendency to sound thin during action scenes.

However, despite these flaws, it's definitely the good points that come out on top, especially once you've given that price due weight.